Ever the trickster, Tagaro appears and multiplies, disappears and reappears, across landscapes past and present in Vanuatu. His ancient adventures, deeds, and follies are deeply inscribed into the northern islands—on Maewo, Ambae, and Pentecost, especially—in rocks, caves, trees, and the shape of hills. In recent decades, Tagaro has journeyed more widely, by way of the conversations and texts of ni-Vanuatu religious scholars and early ethnologists, for the most part within the context of the Melanesian Mission of the Anglican Church. Like all good travelers, he always returns from his journeys transformed, carrying all of the burdens that are implicated in the engagement with otherness that journeying entails. For the Sia Raga of Pentecost Island (Taylor Reference Taylor2008), such fraught Oceanic crossings have split Tagaro into a seemingly contradictory figure. For some he is a benevolent God, for others a maniacal, murderous, axe-wielding foreigner. This radical ambivalence calls to mind Marshall Sahlins' description of those stranger-kings, so prevalent in the histories of neighboring Fiji and beyond, powerful figures who arrive from beyond society and who rule through acting beyond it morally, but in doing so are eventually encompassed by the people, “to the extent that their sovereignty is always problematical and their lives are often at risk” (Reference Sahlins1981b: 111). It also suggests the Deus absconditus of European Christian historiography: a largely unknown but always potentially dangerous “hidden God” that lies beyond human understanding of the covenant.Footnote ² In this paper I explore the troubled histories of Tagaro for what they tell us of changing local engagements with that ostensibly “Other” stranger, Christianity's God Almighty, and of the dynamics of sacred power within the continuing legacy of colonialism's culture. In doing so it demonstrates the ongoing vitality of indigenous Gods, ancestors, and culture heroes to the people of the Pacific region and beyond, and more especially their importance to understanding and negotiating social, political, and religious relations of power.

With some 113 indigenous languages spoken across a current population of a little more than two hundred thousand, Vanuatu is an archipelago of stunning cultural and linguistic diversity (see Allen Reference Allen1981; Bonnemaison et al. Reference Bonnemaison, Kauffman, Huffman and Tryon1996). Oral histories and archaeological evidence attest to the constant changes that occurred in the approximately four thousand years of human habitation prior to colonialism. The most famous pertains to the arrival from Polynesia of another powerful stranger to central Vanuatu, Roy Mata, probably sometime during the 1600s (Bedford Reference Bedford2006: 19). The ongoing transformation of pre-European socio-religious and cultural diversity has been amplified across some four hundred years of Christian missionization. This began with the disastrous arrival of the Spanish explorer Ferdinand de Quiros to Espiritu Santo in 1606 (Jolly Reference Jolly, Jolly, Tcherkezoff and Tryon2009), but more especially when Presbyterian, Catholic, and Anglican missionaries began work in the archipelago in the mid-1800s, followed by Churches of Christ and Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Assemblies of God, and a present explosion of Pentecostal-Charismatic churches. Demonstrating that its history is one of departures as well as dramatic arrivals, Vanuatu gained independence from the joint condominium colonial governance of Britain and France, who in 1980 formally relinquished state control of the New Hebrides, as it was formerly known.

North Pentecost Raga speakers, the language group with which this article is primarily concerned, number approximately seven thousand (see Taylor Reference Taylor2008). The Sia Raga, as I also refer to them here, are overwhelmingly Anglican (some 84 percent), as are those other communities that reside within the historically Melanesian Mission-dominated region of North-Eastern Vanuatu (including North-East Ambae, Maewo, the Banks and Torres Islands, and areas of East Espiritu Santo). North Pentecost settlements are typically virilocal, and subsistence is based on the gardening of taro, yam, and tapioca, and the farming of pigs, chickens, and cattle. Supplementary cash incomes—primarily used to pay for household essentials and school fees—are largely generated from cash-cropping coconuts for copra, and in recent years especially, kava (Taylor Reference Taylor2004: 254–55). Remittances from people living and working in the urban centers of Port Vila and Luganville are increasingly important, especially given the relatively high percentage of Pentecost Islanders working in government and other public service-related jobs.

For most Sia Raga, Tagaro represents a central element in the historical stuff of spiritual and cultural identity—of alengan vanua (“ways of the place”), as it is called in Raga (ibid.: 10–13). My own familiarization with Tagaro began through reading ethnographic and missionary texts in preparation for doctoral fieldwork in social anthropology, undertaken in 1999–2000.Footnote ³ The largely positive, miraculous, and often deific image I encountered in those texts—a “beneficent sky creator-god” (Layard Reference Layard1942: 205), a “wonder-working spirit” (Coombe Reference Coombe1911: 16)—was reinforced during my first months in North Pentecost. I frequently heard people using his name as “God,” even in overtly Christian contexts, by members of the Anglican clergy, and indeed during Anglican Church services. Yet, as I further explored Tagaro's history and character locally through casual conversations and structured interviews, a tangle of inconsistencies, contradictions, and tensions began to emerge. This included an agitated sensitivity concerning the issue of his apparent conversion, or apotheosis, from “mythological cultural hero” to Christian God. Many people with whom I spoke confirmed the view that Tagaro represents a local manifestation of the Christian deity. I was told that, prior to the onset of colonialism, people would pray to Tagaro to perform miracles for them, and indeed that he created the world and everything in it. Others, however, described a very different character, and alongside the apparently unambiguous and positively valorized “creator God” a more sinister figure took shape—that of a destructive, evil stranger. The full force of this contradictory image was emotionally confirmed one afternoon when I sat in conversation over issues of cosmology and cosmogony with an elderly scholar in kastom (loosely, indigenous knowledge and practice), Ruben Todali (see Taylor Reference Taylor2008).Footnote ⁴ When I mentioned that an Anglican Priest had used the name Tagaro to refer to God in a sermon I had attended that morning, Todali responded angrily. Tagaro did not come from Vanuatu, but from Tikopia, he told me.Footnote ⁵ What is more, Tagaro did not come in peace, but as a marauding killer and cannibal. He went on:

For Todali, Tagaro is clearly a very powerful historical figure. He is not, however, a benevolent, omnipotent creator. In fact, in many respects he represents the antithesis of Anglican Christianity's Almighty God. In this paper I address the enigma of Tagaro from an ethno-historical and theological perspective. I do so in such a way that highlights indigenous voices within and alongside missionary and anthropological texts, and that, where necessary, strategically forgoes strict chronological ordering in the interests of pursuing multi-vocal and thematic lines of argument. In doing so, I illustrate how local “culture heroes,” “Gods,” or other indigenous historical figures may emerge as important resources for negotiating indigenous theodicy and understandings of both sacred and political power.

I argue that, prior to the onset of colonialism and his controversial conversion to Anglican Christianity, Tagaro appeared in myriad and sometimes conflicting manifestations. Where he did so he wielded an ambiguous and typically undifferentiated form of sacred power, such as characterized the religious cosmologies of the region (Douglas Reference Douglas and Merwick1994; Reference Douglas1999: 122; Jolly Reference Jolly and Van der Veer1996: 246; Taylor Reference Taylor2008: 59–60). This power, unstable and manipulable in nature, could encompass either or both violence and peace, malevolence and benevolence, destruction and creativity. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the arrival of Anglican missionaries had initiated a dialogue between Christian and ni-Vanuatu that prompted the bifurcation of Tagaro into two unambiguously oppositional figures: a benevolent indigenous God, often equated with the God of the Bible, and a demonic, murderous stranger. Today—following ongoing processes of cultural and religious translation, counter-colonial indigenous liberation theology, and localized political struggle—whereas the conjuncture between indigenous and exogenous notions of sacred power seems to have split Tagaro into two univocal moral opposites, the same conjuncture has at the same time cracked open and exposed something of the morally undifferentiated nature of the foreign Anglican religion. Far from representing a fluid “religious syncretism,” therefore, my analysis of the terms by which this process has occurred betrays the complex and nuanced processes of cosmological, aetiological, and ontological “crossing”—including both convergence and divergence—that adhere within religious colonialism and neo-colonialism in Island Melanesia and elsewhere. Indeed, exploring Tagaro's “split personality” also exposes the ambivalent and in some respects undifferentiated nature of Anglican Christianity's transformative powers, as well as the ambiguity of its position as simultaneously intimate and local, but also as violent and dangerously foreign. In this way, for ni-Vanuatu, the God of the Bible—and hence the versions of Tagaro assimilated to this foreign God—can be seen to retain something of the fullness of prior ideas and expectations about morally ambiguous sacred power. Like Tagaro before him, both He and the colonialism from which this God is inseparable, represent a double-bladed axe whose coming continues to yield destructive tendencies, but is also potentially salvific to their souls.

The arguments made here provide contrast to Scott's stunning analysis of the related historical articulation across indigenous and Anglican contexts of the Arosi severed snake “God,” Hatoibwari, from the neighboring Solomon Islands. However, my argument is not so much concerned with apprehending those apparently coherent, “embedded” ontologies that might belie such foundational histories (although see Taylor Reference Taylor, Reuter and Fox2006; Reference Taylor2008: 73–101), but contends the degree to which these were (or are) seen as “fundamentally incompatible” by either missionaries or indigenous islanders (Scott Reference Scott2007: 266; also Kolshus Reference Kolshus2005: 148). This analysis calls into question scholarly assumptions of acute cultural difference that are routinely made by historians and anthropologists, particularly regarding Christian conversion within the context of colonial expansion to the South Pacific, but also Asia, the Americas, and Africa. Specific to “Melanesia,” it shows recent theories that would fetishize “radical change” in opposition to “continuity thinking” (Robbins Reference Robbins2004; Reference Robbins2007) to be fundamentally problematic, especially in that they ultimately rely on a rigidly dichotomous “model” of equally radical difference, as implied by the terms “assimilation,” “adoption,” or “hybridity.” My aim is not to make the absurd argument that cultural difference does not exist (even if measuring such difference on relative terms, while often difficult to avoid, seems fraught with danger). Rather, just as Sahlins' earliest analysis of “the structure of the conjuncture” (Reference Sahlins1981a) highlighted the simultaneity of alteration and continuity in the dynamics of culture change, I show the importance of being alert to both difference and similarity in accounting for the structural dialectics of history.

With this aim in mind, drawing on Greg Dening's (Reference Dening1980) metaphor of “the beach”—envisaged as a space of mutual mistrust, mystery, and violence, but also of productive exchange—I use the notion of “crossing” to evoke the simultaneous convergences and contradictions among indigenous and exogenous religious paradigms that have guided the transformative dialogues of religious colonialism. Bringing to mind the embodied act of Christian sacralization, “crossing” implies that mixture of articulated juxtaposition and movement, exchange and hostility, which saturates those most vibrant and volatile of cosmological entanglements. As such, while acknowledging the teleologically based presumptions of superiority and progress that accompanied the materially dominant project of empire, the idea of “crossing” is also attentive to the reciprocal mutability of socio-political and sacred power in contexts of religious conversion.

STRANGER GODS AND AMBIVALENT ONTOLOGIES

For early ethnologists, tracing the spatial distribution of the “myths” and “myth cycles” associated with “culture heroes,” “deities,” or indigenous “Gods” was crucial to the development of diffusionist theories of culture change across the Pacific.Footnote ⁷ Tagaro was widely interpreted as a cognate derivative of the Polynesian “God” Tangaroa, best known as the Aotearoa/New Zealand Maori God of the ocean (Grey Reference Grey2008 [1854]: 9–10).Footnote ⁸ For Capell, for instance, Tagaro was “clearly an intruder,” and represented the “leading mark of Polynesian influence in Melanesian territory,” having migrated west into Vanuatu along with a collection of other Polynesian cultural traits (Reference Capell1938: 56–58). Deacon described these as being specific to “the light skinned people found in Omba [Ambae] and north-west Santo, a culture characterized by mats (with red patterns stained on them), which were used as clothing; taro irrigation; kava-drinking; tattooing; Tagaro mythology; and a distinct language type” (Reference Deacon and Wedgewood1934: 704).Footnote ⁹ According to a detailed map drawn by Layard, Tagaro (spelled “Takaro”) could be found in north Pentecost, Maewo, and Ambae, an area that he elsewhere described as “The Land of God” (unpublished sketch map, Layard Papers, box 53, folder 1). He also appeared in the Banks Islands, alongside his adversary Qat, although here in multiple form, as “the eleven brothers Tangaro.” In Malakula and the Small Islands he was Tahgar, or Tahar, and in northeast Espiritu Santo, Takar, or Yetar. He was, however, largely absent in South Pentecost and Ambrym, where Barkulkul appeared instead (Layard Reference Layard1942: 206, map 6).

Both missionaries and ethnologists sought to familiarize as well as exoticize. Indeed, as a proto-ethnographer who at the same time clearly had considerable affection for his Melanesian interlocutors, Codrington aimed to translate his material into terms that his European readership could easily comprehend. Likewise, conceptual equivalences were sought after for the ultimate context of converting “heathens” in “the field.” Epistemologically, this aim was bolstered in the fact that the ordering of human difference implied within the emerging science of evolution overlapped with the both religious and political goals of Empire. Just as the colonial task was to elevate “heathens” to fully “civilized” Christians, religions and their respective “Gods” were placed upon a teleological framework, as rungs on a ladder subjected to time. This kind of hierarchical ordering, which also mirrored racial typologies, is exemplified in the early ethnological account of Felix Speiser: “There is no direct testimony from Aoba, Pentecost, Maewo and the Banks Islands of belief in a deity. However, Quat and Tagaro, for instance, have traits which raise them above the level of a common vui [“spirit”] and therefore they may, particularly Tagaro, who is, of course, nothing but a vulgarized Tangaroa be designated as deities. They do not receive any sacrifices either” (Reference Speiser1996 [1923]: 322). The link to Tangaroa (also Harrisson Reference Harrisson1937: 169, quoted above), the Aotearoa/New Zealand Maori God of the ocean (Grey Reference Grey2008 [1854]: 9–10), is important in that being designated Polynesian rather than Melanesian,Footnote ¹⁰ Tangaroa was considered more “advanced” in the socio-evolutionary terms of the day.

In contrast to previous diffusionist or evolutionary approaches, such figures have come under more recent anthropological scrutiny for the way in which they can be seen to elucidate indigenous paradigms of ontology and sacred power (e.g., Scott Reference Scott2007; Jolly Reference Jolly2003; Taylor Reference Taylor2008). In northern Vanuatu, sacred power is tied to ancestral forces, but also accords to understandings of substance and fertility, and thereby to practices regulating the consumption of certain food crops and the movement and conjunction of sexed bodies (Jolly Reference Jolly, Gregor and Tuzin2001; Taylor Reference Taylor2008). As Tonkinson describes, rather than being harnessed to specific purposes, the activation of such power—by ancestors, high-men, or sorcerers, for instance—can bring about a wide range of effects, from positive to negative, destructive to constructive, and morally good to abhorrent, depending on the technologies applied to it (Reference Tonkinson, May and Nelson1982: 77). This idea of undifferentiated power aptly describes the ambivalence and moral vacillations that characterize Tagaro, and other major culture heroes, as they circulate across the histories of the region (see Taylor Reference Taylor2008: 93–97). But they can also be seen to have crossed beyond this sedimented context, particularly given the colonial contexts across which they have been articulated.

Where Tagaro is concerned, the idea of an undifferentiated sacred power is typically expressed in his own ambivalent behavior, but also through his relationships to equally capricious adversaries. This is a generalized power, even if it is held asymmetrically. While the full range of “stories” concerning Tagaro (and his cognates) is far too diverse to describe here,Footnote ¹¹ one recurring theme is that he often appears as an adversary to another central character or characters, be it Ambat on Malakula, Qat in the Banks Islands, Marambutu on Maewo and Ambae, or indeed other Tagaros. In north Pentecost, Tagaro's rival is Bwatmahanga.Footnote ¹² Bwatmahanga is often described by Sia Raga historians as the “first man,” and is thus generally understood to be the (or at least a) apical male ancestor of North Pentecost (Taylor Reference Taylor, Reuter and Fox2006; Reference Taylor2008).Footnote ¹³ There is always variation between individual accounts, and the synopsis provided here is condensed substantially from an account written in 1966 by the Sia Raga scholar Reverend David Tevimule, and translated into English by the anthropologist Yoshioka Masanori, as “The Story of Raga: A Man's Ethnography on His Own Society (I) The Origin Myth” (Reference Yoshioka1987, also see Taylor Reference Taylor2008: 94–95). In this history, undifferentiated vacillations of sacred power resonate strongly in the character of Tagaro, and particularly across his relationship with Bwatmahanga. Tagaro initially appears as a friend to Bwatmahanga, but is ultimately figured as ill intentioned, devious, and finally murderous. By contrast, Bwatmahanga is both a provider of knowledge, and ideologically, a bringer of “peace” (tamata) in the form of matrilineal kinship principles and the institution of the so-called “graded society” (subwe, or bolololi, Taylor Reference Taylor2008: 48–49). Finally, whereas Tagaro merely drops away from the narrative (according to Ruben Todali he was driven away and killed), Bwatmahanga's death is accorded great cosmogonic significance in that he pioneers the road from Vatangele to “paradise.”Footnote ¹⁴ Nevertheless, in a list of characters that appears at the beginning of his text, Tevimule identifies Tagaro as “God,” and Bwatmahanga is the “Holy Spirit” (along with VingagaFootnote ¹⁵ as “an Angel,” Vatangele as “paradise,” and KalkalianaFootnote ¹⁶ as “Satan”) (the present tense is retained from the original):

As a comprehensive account of a foundational oral history, one that has been authored by a respected Sia Raga scholar, Tevimule's text might be seen to provide unique insights into pre-European understandings of cosmology and sacred power. Still, these must be approached with caution: the narrative was composed some seventy-five years after Codrington collected and published his version of the story (Reference Codrington1891; see below) and must equally be viewed as a colonial representation. Likewise, given the particular circumstances of textual production—the author's position as Anglican cleric, especially—any attempt to gauge the degree to which it might belie a profoundly “deep ontology” (Scott Reference Scott2007: 18–24) seems fraught with danger. Indeed, I am wary of essentialist projects that treat “myth” as residual renditions, ones that somehow hold the code to coherent primordial psychologies, such as might inform our analyses of contemporaneous “mytho-praxis” (Sahlins Reference Sahlins1985: 53–54). Rather, and as Scott also demonstrates (Reference Scott2007: 36), I agree with those who argue for the importance of viewing “myth”—indeed all forms of history—first and foremost as dynamic and historically defined processes of myth making (Jolly Reference Jolly2003: 187). This is because the discourse of both history and myth are simultaneously discourses of identity, consisting of the attribution of meaningful pasts to structured presents (Friedman Reference Friedman1992: 194), as demonstrated here. To do otherwise is both analytically and politically misleading in that it overlooks much more important critical issues relating to the fact that such narratives are invariably constructed with the aim, either directly or indirectly, of passing comment on the colonial or neo-colonial presents in which they are told, and with anticipating futures that might arise from these (Taylor Reference Taylor2004).

To provide further historical context, let me now explore what I take to be a pivotal moment in the early crossing of indigenous and exogenous ideas concerning cosmology and sacred power for North Pentecost, such as took place in conversation between white missionaries and Sia Raga scholars, and other islanders. Granting equal critical weight to oral and textual modalities, I begin with the history of how the gospels first arrived to Pentecost, as told to me by Father Mark Gaviga, a Sia Raga Anglican Priest, in 2000. This oft-told narrative (here, again, somewhat abridged) concerning the revelatory experiences of an old chief, Borotarere, richly communicates the complex mix of anxiety and ambivalence that surrounded Christianity during the early colonial period, but that also adhered to indigenous understandings of sacred power. It also provides a basis for understanding the process of Tagaro's apparent deification by indigenous scholars like Tevimule, and also his demonization by Todali. The date, following missionary sources, would be around 1869:

This history richly demonstrates the complex attitude of ni-Vanuatu to the incursive religion and culture of colonialism. In Borotarere's first dream, the bisope axe that he desires, a symbol of Christianity, cuts away at the roots of a banyan tree, itself powerfully representative of Sia Raga alengan vanua (“ways of the place,” or more broadly, “kastom”) (compare Bonnemaison Reference Bonnemaison1994; Jolly Reference Jolly, Keesing and Tonkinson1982). In the second, the people of north Pentecost leave aboard the Southern Cross, carrying their textile and pig wealth. In turn, the island is repopulated by whites. In the third dream, Borotarere tries to purchase a bisope from a friend at Lamalanga by offering tusked pigs of increasing value, but such wealth is figured as valueless when compared to the unique value of the axe of Christianity. On one hand, the transformative power of Christianity, the object of Borotarere's desire, carries with it a terrible danger of total cultural loss. On the other it represents a road to peace and prosperity. Even so, as is so often the case for the Pacific, the agent of conversion is figured as indigenous rather than colonial (for Vanuatu, compare Morgan Reference Morgan2003; Kolshus Reference Kolshus2005: 148).

Let me now continue the history of Tariwali and the arrival of the gospel to north Pentecost into the late 1800s by focusing on his journey home, and by referring to mainly textual sources. Continuing this discussion of religious “crossing,” here I explore the role that ethnology played in mediating the relationship between indigenous and Christian cosmologies and understandings of sacred power during that period, which were crucial to the shaping of Tagaro's troubled history. These, we shall see, became dangerously crossed with incursive aetiologies of race and colonial power.

COLONIAL ANGLICANISM AND THE RACIALIZATION OF SACRED POWER

The first concerted ethnological study of Sia Raga social life was carried out hand-in-hand with Anglican religious colonialism, by Reverend Robert Henry Codrington. Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, while resident as headmaster of the Melanesian Mission School at Norfolk Island (Hilliard Reference Hilliard1978: 298), Codrington compiled a detailed account of the cultures of the Southwest Pacific, which was eventually published as The Melanesians (Reference Codrington1891). For Codrington, data collection was achieved through a combined approach involving both “armchair” techniques and those of an intermediate generation of survey ethnologists whose methodology was based in the natural sciences (Stocking Reference Stocking1982: 72). Given the shared teleological framework that guided both colonial Anglican Christianity and those sciences, there was no perceived contradiction between Codrington's position as a cleric and agent of social and religious change on the one hand, and as an ethnologist attempting to preserve “native” social life and religious belief on the other. These were two ends of the same Enlightenment vision that saw such “heathens” as “civilized people in the rough, full of potential but yet to experience higher cultural advance” (Knauft Reference Knauft1999: 107). Indeed, for this very reason, a thorough ethnological understanding of Melanesian religion was considered crucial to the missionary enterprise.

On the 5th of May 1875, Codrington arrived at the mission station at Lamalanga, North Pentecost, from Norfolk Island. Also on board the mission ship Southern Cross was his main informant on things Sia Raga, the young student Tariwali (Fox Reference Fox1958: 102), returning to Pentecost with a new baptismal name, Louis. Along with Borotarere's towel, box of matches, and coveted axe, he also carried with him a bible, and with these new strategies of hope and salvation in the emerging light of the Anglican Church. Within that vision—and as the pairing of axe and bible imply—salvation would necessarily involve the suppression or reformulation of local beliefs, practices, and other alengan vanua (“ways of the place”) deemed incompatible with the incoming religion: a cutting down, or at a least major reshaping, of the banyan tree of Sia Raga kastom.

To sense something of the crossed purposes that must have pervaded this relationship, through which Codrington very probably came to know the North Pentecost Tagaro—a crucial turning point in Tagaro's redefinition—I imagine him aboard the Southern Cross as it plies the Coral Sea for Vanuatu. As he sits quizzing Tariwali on matters of indigenous religion and culture, Tariwali, with equal purpose, anxiously anticipates his return home, the words of the gospels uncertain on his lips. That Louis Tariwali's homecoming was both daunting and emotionally traumatic is readily understandable on these terms, as suggested in a letter written by Codrington to an unknown recipient:

Codrington's published account of Tagaro appears in a chapter called “Spirits,” and is a collage of fragments apparently drawn from the characters and stories of several usually unrelated oral histories. Likewise, Tagaro himself is an amalgamation of diverse manifestations from across the northern islands of Vanuatu. In the following extract, these disparate elements can clearly be seen to have been re-fabricated into a manifestly Christian framework, one that incorporates those radically differentiated elements Heaven and Hell, God and a “forked” Devil, and that even goes so far as to suggest a Christ-like epiphany (for Makira, compare Scott Reference Scott2007: 273–82).

It is difficult to ascertain a singular primary source for the ideas and images expressed in this passage. On one hand, bolstered with theories of “natural religion” and “general revelation,” which predisposed them to take a relatively positive view of indigenous concepts, Anglican missionaries routinely attempted to accommodate terms drawn from indigenous beliefs into their own evangelical teachings (Scott Reference Scott2007: 261–300). At the same time, indigenous scholars were themselves active and creative agents in these processes of translation, especially as they themselves grappled to find appropriate and effective strategies of conversion. It is therefore easy to see how Tariwali might have reconsidered his home culture's foundational narratives in terms of the religious, cosmological, and pedagogical framework to which he was being exposed and converted himself. And, at the same time, how better for missionaries to describe the virtues of their own one “true” God than through equation to a similarly exulted (if ultimately inferior) Other? Clearly, Tagaro, as described by Codrington, is the creative product of a melding of ideas concerning Gods, deities, and culture heroes crossing from both sides of the beach, or more particularly, of generative dialogues that crossed it several ways. It is as a result of this dialogue, but also as a crucial function of the linked projects of missionization and ethnology, that Tagaro was radically redefined, differentiated, and transformed from a diversely interpreted and morally ambiguous “culture hero” into a unitary “heathen God.”

Anglican missionaries viewed Melanesians as “men who had been feeling after God, and had not found him, but had satisfied the religious instinct God had given them with… gods” that crudely resembled to the creator deity of the Bible (Cecil Wilson, quoted in Hilliard Reference Hilliard1978: 192; also in Scott Reference Scott2007: 272). Still more explicit correlations between the Christian God and Tagaro appear frequently in statements or observations made by other white missionaries. Wilson, for instance, described in his diary for August the third, 1898, meeting the people of Tavalavus, in north Pentecost: “We wanted them to join us in this religion, they had looked for God & had found Tagaro, & charms, & fighting & c., as tho' they had looked for food and found poison” (1894–1911). Although cast in the negative terms of “heathenism,” Tagaro is nonetheless equated with God by way of opposition.

As the numerous examples presented in this article demonstrate, ni-Vanuatu cosmological principles have articulated with Christian ones in multiform ways throughout colonial and post-colonial history. This movement has opened up considerable space for a play of selective resistances and appropriations by both ni-Vanuatu and missionaries. The argument that such articulation has been facilitated by points of convergence as much as divergence is given added credence when we consider the relative ease by which numerous indigenous Christian leaders and communities subverted the notion that Christianity arrived with the missionaries, but instead posited it as latent or implicit in ancestral religion and sociality, insisting evangelists had merely brought this fact to light (contra Robbins Reference Robbins2007: 2). As Thomas points out, “While metropolitan colonial discourses are often marked in various ways by the irruption of indigenous resistance, irony, or mistranslation, the cultural and political dynamics of the dispersed processes of colonialism can involve a much deeper interpenetration of indigenous and colonial meanings, and may be conditioned, in a profound way, by singular features of indigenous cultural structures and power relations” (Thomas Reference Thomas1994: 63).

By the early twentieth century, the name Tagaro, along with its cognate forms, had become widely adopted by missionaries working throughout the northern islands of Vanuatu to mean “God.” This being the case, one might also speculate upon the degree to which such appropriation on the part of missionaries was accompanied by something of the “superstitious fears” associated with indigenous cosmology—belief in sorcery, ancestral powers, spirits, etcetera—especially for those missionaries and other colonials who lived in close proximity to island communities on a fulltime basis.

Already, then, in the fragmented archive of late-nineteenth-century Anglican colonialism, we find evidence for the emergence of Tagaro's apparent dissociative identity disorder. In the discourse of missionaries he appears, by turns, as a mercurial and multifaceted “culture hero,” the “one true God” by a different name, a “heathen God,” or “the Devil.” From a ni-Vanuatu perspective, however, such divergence would very probably not have appeared contradictory at all. Indeed, as Tevimule's account indicates, such unevenness would have been entirely consistent with the indigenous field of oral history by which he was already known. It would also have accorded to local understandings of undifferentiated sacred power; to a universe in which the powerful figures who wielded such power could do so with either positive and life-bringing or recklessly destructive results, and with a cosmology in which ancestors and “spirits”—in Raga, atatunvanua (“people of the place”)—had an immediate, real-world efficacy that people witnessed and engaged with on a day to day basis.

The ni-Vanuatu cosmological recognition of ambivalently vacillating sacred powers—a characteristic of an essentially undifferentiated nature—resonates strongly across an extraordinary conversation that took place between John Layard and a man called Ta-Maewo on one of the Small Islands of Malakula (probably Atchin), in 1913–1914.Footnote ²³ What is striking here, however, is that the polarization of Tagar's transformative powers into both positive and negative terms—as the sun and the moon together—is also explicitly racialized. This racialization of the morality of sacred power hinges around a differential relation of colonizers and colonized to knowledge and technology. The passage amply echoes Robert Tonkinson's poignant assertion, made in the context of Vanuatu's later independence movement, that “Colonialism's worst single feature is its imbuing of subject peoples with a consciousness of their own inferiority” (Reference Tonkinson2006: 9). Note the reversal of interviewer/subject relation (from Layard n.d.b: n.p.):

Clearly, for ni-Vanuatu, indigenous aetiologies held sway over, alongside, and across exogenous ones well into the colonial period. This does not mean that the Church was seen to hold less power than indigenous institutions, but rather that such power was not comprehended on its own terms. Likewise, it makes sense that motivations to convert are far more likely to have been framed through recourse to indigenous categories than foreign and unfamiliar Christian ones. Indeed, as Ta-Maewo indicates, the vast weight of contemporaneous evidence in a context of rapid population decline would have supported indigenous beliefs in mortal ancestral punishment over Christian ideas of punishment in the afterlife. Thus, while missionaries may not always have been seen as the direct source of epidemic outbreaks, they were invariably associated with them, along with other wielders or conduits of sacred power—ancestors, high-men, and sorcerers (Tonkinson Reference Tonkinson, May and Nelson1982; also see Douglas Reference Douglas and Merwick1994; Reference Douglas1999: 122; Jolly Reference Jolly and Van der Veer1996: 246; Taylor Reference Taylor2004; Reference Taylor2008: 59–60). As we have already seen, such power was seen as neither explicitly good nor bad, but tended to be undifferentiated, and indeed somewhat indiscriminate. As Ta-Maewo's words suggest, however, racial distinctions came to present an important site of differentiation, one that was linked to and no doubt accounted for obvious disproportions of power, wealth, and resistance to disease.

I have argued that for missionaries, the discursive (if not fully cosmo-ontological) crossing of their own exogenous categories and understandings with indigenous ones was inevitable, and indeed was considered a prerequisite to effective translation and conversion “in the field.” What is more, such crossing was facilitated by the fact that missionaries and islanders' respective understandings of sacred power overlapped in crucial areas. For northern Vanuatu, for instance, this can be seen in the two cultures' respective deployment of metaphors of height and light, and the relation of these to spatial practices. Margaret Jolly has shown how conversion to Christianity in South Pentecost entailed a transformation of embodied practices relating to sacred space, based on “a new model of difference and segregation” (Reference Jolly, Jolly and Macintyre1989: 232). This, she argues, “entailed the deconstructing of patterns of segregated eating and sleeping, an end to the exclusivity of the men's house and the cultivation of a new model of women's domesticity” (Reference Jolly, Jolly and Macintyre1989: 234). But her analysis also suggests that such transformations were never complete, and more often entailed adaptations and in some cases reversion to kastom (ibid.). Such crossings and re-crossings, I would suggest, were facilitated by the fact that changing gendered relations, linked as they were to ideas of sacred power, traversed a space of practical and ontological equivalence as much as difference within the entangled context of colonialism's culture.

Individual contexts of conversion differed with regard to denominational emphases, as with the individual techniques and personalities of missionaries, the varying impact of socio-economic factors such as cash-cropping or the labor trade, and the particular nature of local communities and their leaders. Yet, as Harrisson noted early on,

That Anglicans in northern Vanuatu made conscious use of locally specific convergences regarding sacred power is especially apparent in their early appropriation of the term gani sabuga (“sacred food”). Gani Sabuga denoted food sacralized though having been cooked on one of the many matan gabi (“source of the fire,” or sacred ovens) that divided the interior north Pentecost gamali (“men's houses”), and that could only be safely eaten by men of corresponding rank. By 1919, it was also used to refer to the Eucharist.Footnote ²⁴ This, too, was “food” (gani) that had been made sabuga, “taboo,” or sacredly powerful and dangerous (see Taylor Reference Taylor2008: 163–70), though ritualized contact with highly ranked persons, although now as the Body and the Blood of Christ rather than of a more diffuse ancestral power. According to previous North Pentecost proscriptions, a person may only ingest food that has been cooked on a fire that corresponds to their own particular rank, for fear of sickness or death. While ostensibly “shared,” the fact that particular ritualized care was taken in the transference of the Eucharist, and according to newly transformed (and highly racialized) Christian hierarchies, would have corresponded well with overarching concerns regarding the management of food substances, rank, and sexed bodies.

Today, as in the colonial past, that people who receive the Eucharist unworthily are understood to receive their own condemnation, instead of Christ, reifies understandings concerning the undifferentiated nature of sacred power. Indeed, such an understanding might also be considered apposite to the notion of a vengeful God, and more importantly to that of mortal sins. Thus, within Christian understandings, just as to commit sins effects a rupture in a person's link to God's saving grace, so too Ta-Maewo is separated from Tagar through the violence of colonialism (returning to the previous example, and also compare Tavoa, below). Through the combined teleologies of religion and race, being both “heathen” and “black” this is doubly so. Indeed, Ta-Maewo seems to be invoking the distinction between Old and New Testament by first suggesting that access to God's (or Tagar's) favor and saving grace is firmly cemented in racial difference, but then moving on to anticipate salvation through missionary conversion.

Immediately following the above interview transcription, Layard muses:

For North Pentecost Anglicans, indigenous ideas and practices relating to ancestral reproduction and the sacralization of substance and space have become woven into Christian ones (Taylor Reference Taylor2008: 163–70). Thus Holy Communion (or a blessing, for those who remain unconfirmed) today usually follows a prescribed order, which begins with the highest ranking priest (the ritual agent of transubstantiation),Footnote ²⁵ moves down the ranks of the clergy, through high status men followed by high status women, married men followed by women, mixed-gendered young people, children and infants. Likewise the previously strict spatial restrictions that regulated the movement of gendered bodies within gamali (men's houses) according to differential intensities of sacred power associated with rank, can clearly be seen as paralleled within the architectonics of churches (in Raga imwa sabuga, or “sacred house”) and the gendered hierarchies they contain (ibid.: 171–80).Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, many Sia Raga themselves recognize this crossing of indigenous and exogenous forms (Kolombas Todali, personal communication, Port Vila, 1999).

The Melanesian Brotherhood, an evangelical sect of the Melanesian Mission established in 1925, constitutes an explicitly institutionalized site for the material expression of the socio-religious crossings explored here. Father Brian Macdonald Milne, a former Melanesian Brotherhood Chaplain and Tutor, described the “truly Melanesian” composition of the Brotherhood, as follows: “The planning, the leadership and the inspiration were all Melanesian and caught the imagination of Melanesian members of the church. These features can be seen in the aim, uniform, methods and organization of the Brotherhood” (Reference Macdonald-Milne1975: 5). Organization was, and is, based around “households,” each of which “operated very much along the lines of a traditional ‘boys’ house' in a village, where the single young men would live from about the time they entered their teens (or earlier) until they were married” (ibid.: 7).

In the current entanglement of Island Melanesian and Christian cosmologies, this emphasis on male fraternity, sequestration, and sexual abstinence contributes to the sense of heightened spiritual power that surrounds Melanesian brothers, and through which they are able to effect conversions, exorcisms, clearances, healings, and other miraculous acts directed against “dark powers” (in Bislama, dak poa). This is particularly the case in that it rehearses embodied practices and prohibitions previously associated with gamali (“men's houses”) and the subwe (“graded-society”), concerning sexuality and the sharing of food substances, especially (Taylor Reference Taylor2008: 48–49). In that context, by acquiring ancestral grade names through competitive exchange and porcine sacrifice, people and spaces become infused with differing intensities of ancestral power or sacred energy, such as accord to broader regenerative processes involved in childbirth and the harvesting and consumption of particular crops (see Taylor Reference Taylor2008: 167–69; n.d: 19; and for South Pentecost see Jolly Reference Jolly, Gregor and Tuzin2001). Given the potential negative bodily effects associated with such fluctuations of sacred power, in order to ensure ongoing human vitality and fertility, the movement of people and consumption of substances must be carefully managed, thus necessitating both cross- and same-sex avoidance and sequestration. Given the aura of spiritual power acquired by Brotherhood members, through regularly mediating or otherwise coming into contact with powerful sacred forces, it is no surprise that they, too, must be appropriately separated from the community at large.

Further, the racial differentiation of such power through colonialism is embodied in the white and black belts of their uniform, worn and readily interpreted by brothers as a representation of the light of Christianity closing around a “heathen” darkness.Footnote ²⁷ MacDonald-Milne again:

It is important to appreciate the ways in which contemporary conceptions of the relation between morality and ambivalent sacred power have become crossed with race and the continuing asymmetrical and violent legacy of colonialism. This was amply felt in a statement made to me by Tony, a young Sia Raga man, in 2000. In a bemused response to my admission to being a non-Christian, Tony observed the wretched irony that, “We pray, and pray, and pray, but still we haven't got anything. You tuturani [whites, foreigners] never go to church, and yet you've got money, cars, trucks, skyscrapers…”

IN THE NAME OF GOD: LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND THE APOTHEOSIS OF TAGARO

As Tomlinson has explored with regard to the neighboring islands of Fiji, the ideological components of culturally-specific linguistic practices are “integral to the transformations of conversion, and to the perceived effectiveness of religious performance” (Reference Tomlinson2009: 75). In North Pentecost, meanings associated with nouns—like tuturani Footnote ²⁸—and especially pronouns, are of crucial importance to the analysis of objects, actions, and events. This is especially so in that people sacrifice pigs to acquire ihan boe (pig names), and in doing so absorb something of the ancestral substance and character that is often directly implied in the meaning of those names (Taylor: Reference Taylor2008: 169). The names associated with living things are also understood to characterize what they signify, in ways that are practically or spiritually instructive. Bearing this powerful efficacy of names in mind, the fractured manner by which Tagaro is posited in relationship to Christianity has been complicated in that the noun “tagaro” (tagatagaro, meaning “always,” or pertaining to perpetual action) has overlapped with key Christian ideas concerning eternity and immanence. This crossing is apparent, for example, in the “lady missionary” Marion Hardacre's Raga vocabulary of circa 1910–1920, which provides two separate entries: “tagaro” (“always, miracle”), and “Tagaro” (“name of good spirit, one side of house into which people are divided” (n.d.: 85).Footnote ²⁹ Thus, in his diary of 1889, the Reverend Edgel translated into Raga a prayer beginning: “Almighty and most merciful Father, who always hearest those who pray to Thee…”/“Tata, masiu rorono, masiu hahgavi, Gov rau tagaro ranituma rava tataro lalai Nigo…” (1889: 15).

Sia Raga cultural and religious experts readily note that the double-crossing power of these multiple meanings has contributed to the current splintering of interpretations concerning Tagaro. Indeed, they often employ such linguistic knowledge to legitimate their own positions. While Ruben Todali, for instance, reckons that the slippage refers to Tagaro's need to kill every day (Ruben Todali, personal communication, Nov. 2001), as against the need to pray every day (Richard Leona, personal communication, Nov. 2001), John Leo Tamata offers a more nuanced interpretation:

This confusion—which Tamata adroitly reconciles by affirming the simultaneous existence of both Tagaros, and which runs to the heart of the issues explored here—came to full fruition in the post-war period, and especially with the indigenization of the Anglican Church. Here, within the context of increased political empowerment and access to Western-style education, religious scholars continued the process of Tagaro's deification—one that had been originally instigated through the crossed articulations of white missionaries and islanders—by returning him to sacred service in Vanuatu, but now as the fully transformed Christian God proper.

By the late 1950s, denominational alignment had emerged as a crucial factor in defining regional group identity and politics in Vanuatu. Such alignment was primarily based on a rather haphazard arrangement of mainly Protestant, Catholic, and Anglican mission stations. Within the region identified as Tagaro's domain, the main denominations represented were: Anglicanism in north Pentecost, East Ambae and Maewo, Catholicism in South Pentecost, and Churches of Christ in the Nduindui region of West Ambae. At the same time, however, divisions and in some cases overt oppositions emerged within these denominational groupings in the form of new evangelical and traditionalist or kastom movements (for related discussions, see Allen Reference Allen and Leancy1969; Morgan Reference Morgan2003; Jolly Reference Jolly1994; Kolshus Reference Kolshus2005; Reference Kolshus2007; Miles Reference Miles1998). As Morgan (Reference Morgan2003) has explored in detail with regard to Churches of Christ communities, this period was one in which the unity of pre-existing social groups were corroded by power struggles occurring at institutional levels. This included especially the tense interplay between church and state institutions, and the added friction of emerging traditionalist and other counter-movements such as Nagriamel, which spread from Santo across the northern Islands in the late 1960s, under the leadership of Jimmy Stephens.

In the face of such divisive forces, indigenous clergymen nevertheless assumed considerable power as community leaders, and in doing so became heavily involved in the drive for national independence (which eventually came in 1980). Such power within the Melanesian Mission was linked to the British element within the New Hebrides condominium government, as demonstrated by the violent suppression of a prophetic evangelical movement called Silon Dan (the majority of whom later converted to Seventh Day Adventism) in the regions of North and Central Pentecost throughout the 1960s and early 1970s (see Taylor Reference Taylor2008: 201–2, n. 2). Indeed Harry Tevi, the son of Reverend Tevimule (above), was ordained Vanuatu's first Anglican Bishop following the official indigenization of the Anglican Church in 1975 (Hilliard Reference Hilliard1978: xi). Soon after, the late Father Walter Lini—a Sia Raga and New Zealand-educated Anglican priest who traced his ancestry, as he put it himself, to “the famous woman, Nuenue, who was given the wisdom of weaving by Tagaro, the creator” (Lini Reference Lini1980: 7)—would be sworn in as the first elected Prime Minister of independent Vanuatu.

In this turbulent context, Sia Raga Anglican leaders sought to empower their local communities, but in such a way that also entailed a reinforcement of the political power of the Anglican Church (see Siba 1979; Tavoa Reference Tavoa1976; Lini Reference Lini1980). In this, the persuasive doctrinal hegemony that was promulgated, ultimately to a national level, promoted a dual emphasis on skul (Church, but also Western-style education) and kastom (loosely speaking, “traditional practice”) (e.g., Lini Reference Lini1980: 62). In North Pentecost, as a part of this localization and kastom-ization of Anglican Christianity, Tagaro was recruited by indigenous church leaders as their “indigenous God,” thus enjoining the process of religious crossing that had begun in the early colonial period with a specially localized political context.Footnote ³⁰ Witness the following troubled words of Father Michael Tavoa (later Bishop), a pre-independence liberation theologian, and, importantly, a major contributor to the violent suppression of Silon Dan. Answering the question “Is Christ a Melanesian?” and “How should Melanesians understand Christ?” (Tavoa Reference Tavoa1976: 51) in his 1976 Bachelor of Divinity thesis, the following passage is remarkable in the degree to which it both supports and contradicts, and in doing so appropriately summarizes the loosely interlocking set of arguments concerning “religious crossing” that I have made throughout the course of this paper:

In this passage, Tavoa not only asserts that Pentecost Islanders have been disempowered through colonialism, but further, that this has occurred through the eclipsing or sidelining of indigenous Christianity by colonialism's own religious culture and accompanying teleology of heathenism and civilization. This is reinforced through the evocation of Tagaro, who is said to have been banished to a martyr-like death by missionaries. The claim that missionaries “did not enable the local people to understand Christianity on the basis of what they already believed,” which has “caused an unnecessary clash in the minds of the people,” is especially powerful, and relates directly to the theme of racialized sacred power. Following Bashkow's interpretation of The Meaning of Whiteman (Reference Bashkow2006) amongst the Orokaiva of South East Papua New Guinea, Tavoa's analysis suggests Tagaro to be iconic of the split personality of the colonized subject who actively appropriates the destructive other—“the West,” “modernity”—as an “intimate enemy” within (Nandy Reference Nandy1983). Rather than being solely predicated on difference and separation, however, here too there is a “perpetual tension” between radical divergence on one hand, and convergence suggesting closeness, affinity, and sameness on the other (Bashkow Reference Bashkow2006: 13; Tambiah Reference Tambiah1985: 208).Footnote ³¹

In their critical assessments of the relation of Christianity to aspects of indigenous society, religious cosmology, and history, each of the ni-Vanuatu commentators discussed here inevitably confronts the question of how a powerful, and perhaps omnipotent God could preside over a world of violence and inequity, and more specifically, why certain blessings appear to have been given to whites but withheld from black people. Is the answer to this question, as Ta-Maewo wonders, because black people are inherently more sinful? Or, is it because the “hidden” Anglican God wields an ambiguous form of sacred power and can be capricious, just like Tagaro and the ancestors, as in his biblical preference of Abel over Cain or issuing of disastrous plagues through Moses? Or, if this is so, perhaps it is as Father Tavoa appears to be saying; that the true fullness of God has always been present for ni-Vanuatu—manifest, for instance, in the form of Tagaro—and that the notion of black lack and heathen “darkness” is a lie that was put about by whites?

The historicizing of myth and the mythologizing of history does not occur in a structural vacuum, but emerges in the midst of the relational fabrication of personal and group identities. This process consists in anchoring present selves and others in viable pasts, in ways that meaningfully reflect upon or contrast with other people's versions of those pasts, but that at the same time look forward to a significantly transformed future (Taylor Reference Taylor2004). This paper has explored complex transformations of religious meaning associated with a Sia Raga “culture hero,” Tagaro, and his controversial assimilation into Christian contexts by white missionaries and ethnologists, indigenous Anglicans, and other ni-Vanuatu scholars. I have argued that these shifts were facilitated, but also complicated, by the fact that the myriad conversations and conversions that prompted them did not proceed on the basis of assumptions that indigenous and colonial religion and cosmology were altogether different. Indeed, perceptions of religious or cultural difference were also crossed with an awareness of sameness and convergence, particularly in this case with regard to ideas concerning sacred power. Reflecting this entanglement, Tagaro's ambiguous position as a “heathen God,” but one that is simultaneously associated with the light of Christianity and with the foreign white skins of Europeans, has seen him pulled into deep entanglement within localized contests of power, a historical re-crossing that has entailed something of an internalization of the relationship between colonizer and colonized: The crucial point of divergence between Ruben Todali's and Father Michael Tavoa's respective versions of Tagaro's troubled history—marauding foreigner versus local God—hinges around the differential positioning of these men within the fluctuating hierarchies, power, and politics of church and state within pre-independence Vanuatu. If, as Ruben Todali suggests, there are now too many names for God, this is because Tagaro has somehow diverged and fused into two separate, contested, yet ambivalently connected entities. By contrast, from within the indigenizing Anglican Church and approaching national independence, Tavoa posits Tagaro as a banished God, and does so in order to assert a form of traditionalism that is pointedly anti-colonial. For Ruben Todali, whose traditionalism is more explicitly localized, kastom-oriented, and ideologically opposed to the institutionalized Anglican hierarchy that Tavoa represents, Tagaro appears as an evil stranger, that “God belonging to the people of England, who sent the missionaries here.” A fitting outcome, perhaps, of this particular crossing of Anglican and indigenous understandings of sacred power: for one he represents a pre-colonial indigenous Christianity, for the other an image of the violence of colonialism itself.